In “The Success of Open Source”, Weber contrasts the Kissinger question of “When I call Europe who answers the phone” with the equivalent of “When Microsoft calls Linux who answers the phone” to show what is really being asked is “how does a hierarchically structured (government) deal effectively with a powerful institution structured in a fundamentally different way. Take this one step generalisation further and the question becomes what are the dynamics of increasingly dense relationships between hierarchies and networks”. He further asks “what happens at the interface, between network and hierarchies, where they meet?”
“Dimaggio and Powell…developed a powerful argument about isomorphism, detailing some of the pressures driving organisations that are connected to each other in highly dense relationships to change so they come to look more like each other structurally.”
“In the foreign policy and security field, David Rondfeldt and John Arquilla have for almost ten years been making prescient arguments about the rise of networks in international conflict and the implications for what they call ‘netwar’. Their policy propositions – ‘heirarchies have a difficult time fighting networks, it takes networks to fight networks, and whoever masters the network form first and best will gain major advantages’ – track the institutional isomorphism literature by encouraging hierarchical governments to remake their security organisations as networks to interface successfully with their network adversaries.”
“In international relations theory, Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink have asked similar questions about relationships between transnational ‘advocacy networks’ and national governments. Other studies of global social movements talk about the emergence of ‘complex multilateralism’ to describe a form of governance that emerges in the interaction between international organisations and transnational networks. These are valuable perspectives as far as they go. But they still suffer from an unfortunate ‘bracketing’ of the hierarchical structure as that which is somehow ‘real’ or concrete, while trying to prove that networks ‘matter’ vis-a-vis more traditional structures. The next question they naturally ask, ‘Under what conditions do networks matter?’ is premature unless the answer can be well structured in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. To get to that point requires a good conceptual articulation of the space in which the game of influence is played out. And that is still lacking.”
“The open source story as I have told it here points to a different way forward. Two distinct but equally real organisational forms exist in parallel to each other. The dynamic relationship between hierarchies and networks over time determines both the nature of the transition and the endpoint. One form may defeat the other through competition. Both may coexist by settling into separate niches where they are particularly advantaged. Most interesting will be the new forms of organisation that emerge to manage the interface between them, and the process by which those boundary spanners influence the structure and function of networks and the hierarchies that they link together.”
“If my generic point about creativity at the interface is correct, it is then my strong presumption that this is a problem suited for inductive theorising through comparative case study research. The war against terrorism, the relationship between open source and proprietary models of software production, and the politics among transnational NGO networks and international organisations share characteristics that make them diverse cases of similarly structured political space. I am certain that some of the most interesting processes in international politics and economics over the next decade are going to take place in this space, at the interface between heirarchies and networks (rather than solely within either one). Comparing what evolves in diverse instantiations of that space is one way forward.”